Joe Mitchell Media Services

my strange, but inspiring interview with Bob Mould back in the mid-90’s

This feature on Husker Du frontman and post-punk songwriting God Bob Mould and his work with his band, Sugar, was published in Puncture magazine, I dunno, around 1995. I’m an old codger and have difficulty remembering such details nowadays. Mould was living in Austin at the time and File Under Easy Listening had just come out as had Mr. Mould himself in addition to becoming his own manager. You could tell he’d been working like a fiend and exposed to no end of scrutiny. He was nervous and tense, chain-smoking, and got a bit pissy with me at one point (see the start of the article), but soon calmed down when he realized I was more interested in the music and his business acumen than his sexual proclivities. This all took place one late afternoon on the back porch at Flipnotics on Barton Springs Road, my favorite interview venue- R.I.P. I also did a review of FUEL for the Austin Chronicle and will post that, too, if I can ever find it. I’ve got tons of published work samples saved across 5 computers on my LAN and and 3 different cloud drives. Yes, I am a mess. Let me know what you think about the article in the comments below. The pdf of the article is at the link below. Yes, this was during the days when most music mags were still paper. Puncture was based in San Francisco for awhile, then the publishers, a husband and wife team who were cool to no end, moved to Portland. For some reason, they used a printer here in Austin out by Reagan High School in what used to be the hinterlands of Northeast Austin. I went up there once on an errand for them, to deliver some proofs or something, and the smell of ink was intoxicating. I think I still smell like it, it was so strong. Ah. Back in the day we didn’t have ipods and digital readers, and blogs and websites and all that stuff. We had to crawl through broken glass to get to the printers. Cheers!